Roll the Dice's Peder Mannerfelt takes on Afro-punk-funk supergroup

Ethiopian jazz-funk will not be gentrified. That’s the message of Melt Yourself Down, a hard-charging London six-piece made up of members of Acoustic Ladyland, Hello Skinny, Zun Zun Egui, Sons o Kemet, Broadway’s Fela! lineup, and even Mulatu Astatke’s Heliocentrics. Their new single “Fix My Life” snatches the music’s legacy from twee gatekeepers like Wes Anderson and thumps it proudly down in the middle of a flailing dancefloor, as messy and dissonant as your life. It’s Addis bananas. Leave it to someone like Sweden’s Subliminal Kid — Peder Mannerfelt, of Roll the Dice — to remix the tune in a way that doesn’t suck all the life of it, quantized beats or no. Upping the tempo, he lays down a lurching machine rhythm and adds lashings of synth squiggle and white noise, re-framing all that modal skronk in electro-industrial terms: Addis Ababa meets Detroit in the year 3013.